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Part-time Faculty positions at Montgomery College, MD

Montgomery College, in Maryland, is a three-campus community college serving over 50,000 students represented from more than 160 countries. If you are interested to teach Biology in a diverse community college environment, look out for part-time faculty announcements in the provided link! Job positions will be advertised about two months before the start of a semester.

NEON Data in the Classroom: Using the QUBES Platform and Faculty Mentoring Networks to Build, Adapt, and Publish Data­-Driven Teaching Resources

The integration of data-­centric teaching practices plays a major role in efforts to transform biology education. Working with authentic data increases student exposure to scientific practices and contributes to the development of quantitative skills.

Bring large-­scale ecological data into the classroom can be challenging, where the skills required to manipulate and analyze these data sets can be a large hurdle for both educators and students.

We share the outcomes from a partnership between university/college faculty, the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON), and the Quantitative Undergraduate Biology Education and Synthesis project (QUBES) to develop and disseminate teaching resources that use NEON data and provide training and community to faculty.

The NEON FMN has been offered for three semesters with 37 faculty participating, resulted in a wide variety of new and adapted modules being publicly available.

We found the QUBES-FMN model to be successful in providing online professional development and creating communities of educators without geographic barriers. Our work highlights how this model of curriculum development and faculty engagement has been successfully applied to NEON data for the classroom.

Environmental Arts or Humanities TT position - Bates college

"We seek a scholar or scholar/practitioner in cultural studies, literature, or performing/studio arts who is attentive to hierarchies of power and privilege and can offer cross-cultural and/or transnational perspectives on environmental traditions. Fields and research approaches are open, but could include: critical race theory, ecocriticism and nature writing, ecofeminism/feminist environmentalism, energy humanities, indigenous and post-colonial/decolonial/decolonizing environmentalisms, posthumanism and animal studies, and queer ecologies. Applicants with a demonstrated record of working successfully with a diversity of students, including underrepresented and marginalized populations, are encouraged to apply."

Hi. Yes, I am working on making the RStudio IDE accessible in the next release (1.3), and happy to talk about it.

We (RStudio) do recognize the importance of this. Unfortunately it is a retro-fit, rather than something that was baked in from the start, so it's a major undertaking. I'm happy to talk to any interested parties about progress and plans, and share early builds once they have reached a useful level of functionality.

More background:

RStudio Server is a web application, used via a web browser, thus subject to web accessibility guidelines and technologies.

RStudio Desktop is also a web application! It's essentially the same web application as RStudio Server but displayed in a desktop shell using the Chromium browser (the open-source core of Google Chrome). There are some additional accessibility challenges due to this, still being worked through, and right now I'm focused on the shared RStudio Server aspects.

I am targeting WCAG 2.1 level AA compliance, testing primarily with VoiceOver/Safari on Mac, and FireFox/NVDA on Windows. I do also conduct some tests with other combinations of screen readers and web browsers, including Chrome, JAWS, and Narrator. Naturally as part of this working towards full usability with keyboard-only, and voice-control.

In order to release RStudio 1.3 in a reasonable amount of time (very tentatively aiming for first half of 2020), I don't expect to achieve full compliance for every nook and cranny of the RStudio IDE (though I will try). Any known exceptions will be called out in our WCAG/VPAT assessment documents.

I am aware that "compliance" with things such as WCAG does not always translate to genuine "usability", and early testing and feedback from real users will be greatly appreciated.

Project Biodiversify is a repository of teaching materials and methods

aimed at enhancing human diversity and inclusivity in biology courses.

People – including students and biologists – exhibit a diverse set of backgrounds and identities. However, most biology students are not exposed to a diversity of role models in the field of biology, and many students are taught about biology in a way that (often unintentionally) does not feel inclusive to them or their communities.

Project Biodiversify is here to help! We are an online space that promotes the humanization, diversification, and inclusivity of biology classrooms.

PeerWise - an open question authoring tool

PeerWise is an open question authoring tool that allows students to author questions, and also to answer other students' questions. The site allows for comments and ranking and also has a badge system to encourage students to participate actively with the tool. I have utilized this tool in several courses (General Chemistry, Organic Chemistry, General Biochemistry). Please find a powerpoint file attached with additional information. You can access the tool at https://peerwise.cs.auckland.ac.nz/

Who are You? What You Got?

Using organelle counts from SEMs to help students determine potential cell types, so they actually "see" that various cell types can differ based on the number and type or organelles they possess. They will graph their counts and calculate means for each organelle type.

Who are You? What You Got?

Using organelle counts from SEMs to help students determine potential cell types, so they actually "see" that various cell types can differ based on the number and type or organelles they possess. They will graph their counts and calculate means for each organelle type.

Wetlands Research Cluster Hire – Three Assistant Professors

We are seeking two plant biologists and one invertebrate biologists with a research focus on wetlands. Please talk with Holly Gaff if you are interested or want more information. Please pass this ad to anyone you know on the market for these kinds of positions!